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Fox News Alarm Over Seattle Zone Contrasts With Friendly Coverage Of Bundy Gang

Fox News Alarm Over Seattle Zone Contrasts With Friendly Coverage Of Bundy Gang

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters

When Americans are at odds with the government, Fox News has a lot to say -- but which side Fox figures take in such cases seemingly depends on the politics and race of those involved.

As peaceful protests against police brutality and racism in the U.S. continue to unfold nationwide, Fox News has been laser-focused on demonizing the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP), a recently formed six-block radius zone in Seattle, Washington, that is free of police. Fox has framed CHOP protesters as engaging in "anarchy," "outright insurrection," and an "occupation."

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Party Lines Don’t Apply In Fights Over Western Land

Party Lines Don’t Apply In Fights Over Western Land

By Eric M. Johnson

Every time Dean Finnerty sees the locked neon-yellow gate and “No Trespassing” sign deep in Oregon’s Elliott State Forest, he bristles at the growing movement to transfer federally owned land to U.S. states.

The 52-year-old conservationist and lifelong political conservative worries that cash-strapped states that acquire such land will ultimately be forced to sell to private companies only to extract oil, gas and timber.

He is one of many conservative outdoors enthusiasts to join liberal environmentalists in opposing such transfers.

They stand against business interests and conservative states’ rights advocates who argue that handing the land to states will unleash its economic potential.

Finnerty likes to hunt bear and elk on public land in Oregon with his five sons. But their outings were curtailed two years ago when the state, which had acquired the land from the federal government, in turn sold some of it to logging companies.

“When the federal government owned these lands they were better equipped to keep and maintain them,” said Finnerty, who keeps a handgun in his truck in case he encounters a mountain lion. “The idea that we could lose these federal public lands is not acceptable.”

Finnerty and his fellow sportsmen, many of them conservatives who instinctively oppose big government, are petitioning lawmakers, writing opinion columns and staging protests at state capitols. They fear losing access to prime hunting and fishing lands if states take control.

They have won backing from dozens of trade groups and companies, including fishing rod makers Orvis Corp and Sage and gun manufacturer Remington.

‘ABSURD … ABSENTEE OWNERSHIP’

Their protest is at odds not just with anti-federalists such as the armed militiamen who seized control of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon earlier this year, but also many in the Republican Party mainstream.

Republicans last month officially embraced federal-to-state land transfers for the first time in their party platform, saying it is “absurd” that so much land is under Washington’s “absentee ownership.”

The ideological standoff marks a new front in the “Sagebrush Rebellion,” the decades-old fight over land-use in the U.S. West.

At stake is control of roughly 640 million acres of federally owned land, more than one-fourth of the U.S. land mass, most of which falls across a dozen Western states, according to the Congressional Research Service. here

For a graphic of federal land ownership across the United States, click here:tmsnrt.rs/2b8CKe1

Supporters say transfers could be lucrative. Oil and gas reserves on federal lands could generate $12.2 billion annually over the next decade, supporting more than 87,000 jobs, a 2013 University of Wyoming study estimated. goo.gl/7Mm8KY

More than 30 bills pushing for federal land transfers were introduced in Western states in 2015, according to the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, which opposes transfers. More than a dozen have been filed this year, said the Center for Western Priorities, another opponent.

Wyoming, Idaho, Arizona and Nevada have passed bills to study the issue.

Utah went further in 2012, demanding millions of acres of federal land and authorizing a lawsuit if that did not occur by 2014. Utah has not sued yet.

MONEY AND MANPOWER

John Ruple, a University of Utah professor of public land law, said the state has no legal case and the U.S. Congress controls such transfers.

Karla Jones of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group of conservative lawmakers and business leaders who have ushered virtually identical land-transfer legislation through several state legislatures, hopes a new Congress after November’s election will support the push.

“The federal government does the exact same thing the states do. It leases land to the extractive industries,” she said. “The big difference is the U.S. generally loses money.”

But those fighting for the status quo, including Finnerty, say states lack the money and staffing to enforce the law across massive tracts of rugged, remote terrain.

There has been no wholesale transfer of federal tracts in decades, though small transfers are common.

Oregon received the Elliott State Forest from the U.S. government in a 1930 land transfer, hoping to fund schools through timber sales and investments. But it sold thousands of acres to logging companies in 2014 after revenues plunged.

Next year, Oregon hopes to fetch more than $220 million for the remaining 82,500 acres.

“This is a coordinated, multiyear campaign to take away our federal public lands, which are an American birthright,” said Whit Fosburgh, president of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in the Elliott State Forest, Oregon; Editing by Ben Klayman and Jonathan Oatis)

Photo: Avid hunter and angler Dean Finnerty, 52, of Scottsburg, Oregon, stares at a locked gate on a logging road through which for years he would hunt black bear and elk before the land was sold and he lost access inside the Elliott State Forest in southwest Oregon, U.S. on July 27, 2016.  REUTERS/Eric Johnson

The Bundys Are Bumbling Villains In This Western

The Bundys Are Bumbling Villains In This Western

Looks like that epic cowboy movie Cliven Bundy and his boys dreamed of playing starring roles in will never get made. Thankfully, their own epic stupidity ended the fantasy less in tragedy than in farce—definitely more “Blazing Saddles” than “The Wild Bunch.”

Or was it “Cliven Bundy and the Sundance Kid” they were going for? No matter. That one ended badly for the romantic outlaws too.

Apart from the needless death of one True Believer in a cowboy hat who committed what city folks call “suicide by cop”—announcing his determination never to be taken alive and then reaching for his pistol—the rest of Bundy’s sagebrush revolutionaries eventually surrendered without incident. Most are headed to Federal prison.

The ignominious end of their occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in remote eastern Oregon should serve as an object lesson to crackpot insurrectionists across the West. No, the public won’t come rushing to your support. Local ranchers wanted nothing to do with the uprising. A bird sanctuary was badly chosen place to make a stand. Put it this way: millions of Americans enjoy hiking, hunting, and bird-watching.

Cow-watching, not so much.

Nor have you intimidated the U.S. government. “Who are those guys?” Butch and Sundance wanted to know. But any two-bit drug dealer in Baltimore or New York could have told them that you can’t go around pointing guns at Federal agents and start traveling the countryside holding press conferences.

How foolish would you have to be to imagine you could? The Bundy sons vowed a bloody standoff at the Malheur refuge, and then announced a public meeting in the next county 100 miles away. Only one highway links the two places. FBI agents and Oregon state cops set up a roadblock at a remote spot and bagged the lot.

Family patriarch Cliven Bundy next announced his intention to show up in Oregon to support the remaining occupiers. But you can’t take no shooting iron on a commercial airline flight. Secure in the knowledge that he and his posse would be unarmed, agents met him at the gate. They’d been waiting almost two years for the old fool to set himself a trap.

The rebel rancher may never again be seen outside a courtroom. According to a press release distributed by the U.S. Attorney in Las Vegas: “Cliven Bundy and four others were indicted by the federal grand jury today on 16 felony charges related to the armed assault against federal law enforcement officers that occurred in the Bunkerville, Nev. area on April 12, 2014.” A U.S. District Judge in Oregon denied his bail request on the grounds that the 69 year-old rancher is clearly a flight risk.

The FBI grinds slow, but fine. Among the offenses Bundy’s charged with are “Assault on a Federal Law Enforcement Officer,” and “Threatening a Federal Law Enforcement Officer.” The first carries a 20 year sentence and $250,000 penalty; the second 10 years and $250,000.

The indictment stipulates that he and his sons Ryan and Ammon, “planned, organized, and led the assault in order to extort [government] officers into abandoning approximately 400 head of cattle that were in their lawful care and custody. In addition to conspiring among themselves to plan and execute these crimes, the defendants recruited, organized, and led hundreds of other followers in using armed force against law enforcement officers in order to thwart the seizure and removal of Cliven Bundy’s cattle from federal public lands. Bundy had trespassed on the public lands for over 20 years, refusing to obtain the legally-required permits or pay the required fees to keep and graze his cattle on the land.”

We all saw the whole thing on national TV. Back in Nevada, Federal officials who found themselves outnumbered four to one made a tactical decision not to risk a bloodbath over a herd of scrawny cows. At the expense of being criticized by people spoiling for a showdown, authorities apparently saw limited harm in letting Bundy declare victory while holing up at his remote desert ranch with his posse. Capturing him wasn’t worth a single agent’s life.

Which is why it’s so important that their patience paid off. Also crucial was the Oregon community’s near-unanimous rejection of the Bundy cause.

Cattle ranchers can certainly grow frustrated with government bureaucracy, but they also tend to be extremely practical people. The Bundy acolytes struck them as crackpots; their theories of constitutional law as zany as their tactics.

University of Oregon geography professor Peter Walker spent weeks documenting the local response. “At one community meeting,” he wrote “when almost the entire leadership of the Bundy group arrived unexpectedly, citizens of Harney County stood on their feet, pointed fingers at the Bundys and chanted “Go home! Go home! Go home!”

Real cowboys, see, can’t just go gallivanting off and leave their herds.

Particularly not in winter.

Photo: Inmates Ammon Bundy (L) and his brother Ryan Bundy are seen in a combination of police jail booking photos released by the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office in Portland, Oregon January 27, 2016.  REUTERS/MCSO/Handout via Reuters

Last Four Occupiers Surrender At Oregon Wildlife Refuge, Ending 41-Day Standoff

Last Four Occupiers Surrender At Oregon Wildlife Refuge, Ending 41-Day Standoff

By Jimmy Urquhart

BURNS, Ore. (Reuters) – The four holdouts in an armed protest at a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon surrendered on Thursday, with the last occupier repeatedly threatening suicide during an intense phone call with mediators before he finally walked out, ending the 41-day standoff with the FBI.

David Fry, 27, had stayed behind for more than an hour and told supporters by phone he had not agreed with the other three to leave. The call was broadcast live on an audio feed posted on the Internet.

“I’m actually pointing a gun at my head. I’m tired of living,” Fry said during the phone call. He later added, “Until you address my grievances, you’re probably going to have to watch me be killed, or kill myself.”

Fry was alternately defiant and distraught during the rambling final call, veering from rants about the federal government to his thoughts on UFOs. He surrendered after taking a final cigarette and cookie and asking his mediators to shout “hallelujah.”

Authorities could be heard over the phone line telling him to put his hands up before the call disconnected. Portland’s KGW television later showed a caravan of sport utility vehicles escorted by police driving out of the refuge in remote eastern Oregon.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement the final four occupiers had surrendered and face charges of conspiracy to impede federal officers, along with 12 others previously arrested.

“The occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge has been a long and traumatic episode for the citizens of Harney County and the members of the Burns Paiute tribe,” U.S. Attorney Billy Williams said in the statement. “It is a time for healing, reconciliation amongst neighbors and friends, and allowing for life to get back to normal.”

Williams said now that all of the protesters had been taken into custody, law enforcement officials would “assess the crime scene and damage to the refuge and tribal artifacts.”

CLIVEN BUNDY ARRESTED

The takeover at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which began on Jan. 2, was sparked by the return to prison of two Oregon ranchers convicted of setting fires that spread to federal property in the vicinity of the refuge.

The standoff, which was originally led by brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy, came to a head after the arrest on Wednesday in Portland of their father, Cliven Bundy. On Thursday he was charged with conspiracy, assault on a federal officer and obstruction of justice in connection with a separate 2014 standoff on federal land near his Nevada ranch.

The Malheur occupation had also been a protest against federal control over millions of acres public land in the West.

Ammon and Ryan Bundy had been arrested in January along with nine other protesters on a snow-covered roadside where a spokesman for the group, Robert “LaVoy” Finicum, was shot dead. A 12th member of the group surrendered to police in Arizona.

After Cliven Bundy’s arrest, three of four remaining occupiers surrendered to the FBI at the urging of Nevada state Assemblywoman Michele Fiore and Rev. Franklin Graham, the son of Christian evangelist Billy Graham. Fiore and Franklin Graham both traveled to the site.

Jeff Banta, 46, of Elko, Nevada, and married couple Sean Anderson, 48, and Sandy Anderson, 47, of Riggins, Idaho, surrendered peacefully, according to the webcast of a phone call with the protesters.

The protesters narrated the surrender, with the married Andersons described as emerging with their hands up, holding hands.

Fry arrived at the occupation within the first week, and told Oregon Public Broadcasting that he was inspired by Finicum. Fry emerged as one of the most outspoken protesters, due primarily to frequent, often angry rants on social media.

The skinny, bespectacled Ohio native from a military family has also expressed outrage when dealing with what appear to be minor criminal offenses in his past. In a YouTube video from September, Fry can be heard saying he refused to pay fines “for smoking marijuana on a river and not wearing a life jacket,” and then appears to set fire to a debt collection notice.

Fry’s father told Oregon Public Broadcasting that his son has also screamed at a police officer who had pulled him over for broken taillights.

The elder Fry said his son was bullied in high school because of his Japanese heritage, and that he worked odd jobs at his father’s dental office instead of following his father and brother into the U.S. Marines.

(Additional reporting by Shelby Sebens in Portland, Oregon; Barbara Goldberg and Joseph Ax in New York, Julia Edwards in Washington, Eric M. Johnson in Seattle and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Writing by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Sara Catania, Jeffrey Benkoe and Lisa Shumaker)

Photo: Cliven Bundy is pictured in this undated booking handout image provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, February 11, 2016. REUTERS/Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office/Handout via Reuters